Caliber Session 4: SPÖKHUS, Part 2

The construction of the Ikea had been completed about 9 months ago, its garish blue and yellow walls marking it like a carbuncle amid the other squat, grey warehouses. The industrial estate it had sprung up in was a little out of the way of any main roads, so the car park was quiet when Nora’s bike rolled to a halt.

Merlin had clambered out of the sidecar almost before the engine had stopped, his face a shade of hospital-green. ‘You drive like a Roomba full of crack,’ he said, when he’d managed to take a breath.

‘If people don’t want to be overtaken, they should drive a little faster,’ said Nora, in the tones of one that had explained this hundreds of times before, possibly to the police.

‘Yeah Merlin,’ said Ursa. ‘I thought that was pretty exciting!’

She was leaning on a nearby car for support.

*

Inside, there was a bored girl – probably still a teenager – on the reception/customer service desk beyond the revolving door. An escalator stretched up to the showrooms.

‘Hi,’ began Ursa. ‘We’re here about the loss prevention cover?’

‘The four of you?’ asked the girl, not looking up from her phone.

‘Four?’ asked Ursa.

An unnaturally pale man leaned against the wall behind them, dressed in a well-tailored, white and black suit. He gave a little wave, and when the three focused their attention on him, they could see one of his eyes, too, was black. He wasn’t trying very hard to hide his Infernal nature.

Before anyone could question him, though, the Loss Prevention Manager came bursting from the staff area.

‘Right, good afternoon,’ he announced, his accent thick and blunt. ‘My name’s Brian. I know you’ve already gone through’t interview process, so we’ll just have a PowerPoint induction to get through before we can get started.’ He paused, surveying his troops. ‘I see we’re one short, though?’

‘Oh, no, I got here first,’ said another new voice. There was a fifth person stood with them, his grinning mouth full of sparkling emeralds. He had hair in purple locs, perfectly smooth brown skin, and wore an understated button-up shirt with jeans. Obviously, he was Fae. He had not been there before.

Brian, though, just seemed to accept it. As he led them back towards the staff room, Nora kept herself to the rear of the group. That two Outsiders were also here, presumably for the same reasons as she was? That probably meant things would become… complicated. Though, perhaps it was a blessing in disguise? At least she wouldn’t have to work with vanilla human staff members. No risk of getting Audited, she hoped.

She eyed the back of Brian’s balding head. Well, almost.

Oblivious to her gaze, Brian was talking them through the responsibilities of a loss prevention officer. Ursa alone nodded along in feigned interest, as the others had stayed far back enough to escape his notice.

A buzzing interrupted Brian halfway through something about waiting for a shoplifter to leave the premises. He glanced at his phone, then gave an exasperated grunt. Ursa bore down on the opening right away.

‘Everything ok, Boss?’ she asked.

‘Oh. Yeah, just another stupid text.’ Seeing Ursa’s expression, Brian explained. ‘Some joker’s got hold of the list of employee phone numbers. Sending texts at random, pretending they’re stuck in a wardrobe or somethin’. When I find out who it is, believe me, they’ll wish that was what’d happened.’

‘Excuse me, Brian, but could I request a visit to the nearest bathroom?’ said Merlin, quite suddenly.

‘Eh? Oh. Yeah, toilets are just a bit back there. I’ll only be setting the PowerPoint up so just find us in the staff room, yeah?’

‘I would also like to use the bathroom before we get started, actually,’ said Nora, thinking along similar lines to Merlin.

‘Yeah, yeah, no worries,’ said Brian. ‘Come on, whoever doesn’t need the toilet.’

Ursa and the others followed him into the staff room. It was a fairly standard affair, with a few tables and a corkboard with notices for employees. The walls were an inoffensive off-white, and other than a damp patch in the middle of the ceiling, it seemed quite well-kept.

Ursa made an excuse to leave near-immediately. ‘Oh, one sec Boss, I just need to make a quick phone call,’ she said, brushing past Brian on her way out.

Back in the bathrooms, Merlin had opened up his laptop and promptly broken into the store’s network drives. He’d spotted the Wi-Fi password on a corkboard through the staff room door, so he was in and poking about within maybe a minute.

The list of employee phone numbers wasn’t particularly hard to find either. The file was password protected, but said password was ‘Password1’. He gave a derisive little snort as he pressed enter.

He also threw together a quick program to extract text logs of messages, and their senders, sent to devices on the Wi-Fi network. This he set to work on Brian’s phone.

The source of the message Brian had received was a signal bouncing around the various routers in the building, with no apparent provenance. Oddly enough, there appeared to be over six thousand routers on the network.

In the bathroom next door, Nora prodded at a holographic projection of a phone screen she’d conjured with a Remote Access spell. It wasn’t a simulation – her spell allowed her to physically affect the targeted hardware; in this case, Brian’s phone. The text he’d received was a simple two words:

Help us

As Nora pondered this, another message appeared:

Where are you?

Ursa had just pressed send on the phone she’d plucked from Brian’s pocket. ‘Where are you?’ she’d asked of the cry for help. If whatever spirit was trapped here was communicative, Ursa wanted to do what she could to free it. She waited for just a moment, and paled a little at the response.

Are you a threat?

Nora finished her reply. She didn’t know how the thing knew she was accessing Brian’s phone, but the fact that it did was worrying. What she got in reply was somewhat horrifying.

No, we just want to free you!

Merlin, having pieced together what was going on, emerged from the bathroom, though not before snickering at the chat log for a while. After a moment, the three were on the same page.

‘So it’s the Wi-Fi itself that’s asking for help?’ asked Ursa.

‘More like something riding it,’ Merlin replied. ‘Though I haven’t yet thought of an explanation for the number of routers on the network.’

‘There’s a few options. None of them good,’ said Nora, before adding dryly, ‘Come on, we don’t want to miss the PowerPoint.’

*

In the staff room, the PowerPoint had not yet begun. Brian lay slumped over a desk, with the green-toothed Fae working some kind of glittery magic over his head.

‘Ah,’ said the Infernal man, from the back of the room. He’d put his feet up. ‘I believe introductions are in order. You’re from the Institute, are you not?’

He got up and gave a shallow bow. ‘Azoth Alkahest,’ he said. ‘It is not a pleasure to meet you, but I have only just told you my name.’

‘That’s a bit obvious, isn’t it?’ asked Ursa. ‘Doesn’t the name ‘Alkahest’ throw normal people off?’

‘My name is my name; if it raises a red flag with a mortal or two, that is the price they must pay for my honesty.’

‘Yeah, okay,’ said Ursa.

Nora butted in. ‘More to the point, what are you doing?’

The room’s other occupant straightened up from behind Brian’s sleeping form. His emerald smile flashed in a face with bold, handsome features; the unnatural beauty of the Fae much more at the forefront than earlier.

‘Montparnasse,’ he said. The accent didn’t match the name. ‘This guy here isn’t in pain or anything, so stop worrying about that. And Nora, if you’re going to pull the gun you have, I will wake him up and I’m sure you don’t want to explain all that, do you?’

Nora’s hand paused where it had been slowly moving towards her pistol. Had he read her that easily?

‘Yes, I had,’ said Montparnasse. ‘But I do have a bit of an advantage.’

Oh, wonderful, a fucking psychic. The thought arrived before Nora could stop herself.

‘Yeah, that’s it. Now, you three are here for the same reason Akahest and me are. The plan is to come back after closing tonight and deal with it.’

Alkahest, having sat back down, gave another little wave. ‘We aren’t working together, mind you,’ he said. ‘We’re just both here on common business.’

‘I am here to destroy the thing haunting this place, on behalf of my Queen,’ said Montparnasse.

‘What about him?’ asked Merlin, when Alkahest didn’t volunteer a response.

Montparnasse just smiled. ‘I’ll tell you what he’s thinking if you agree to assist me?’

‘No,’ said Merlin and Nora, simultaneously.

‘Hey, can we get a couple of minutes without you reading our minds?’ Ursa chimed in. ‘Just so we can all get on the same page and negotiate properly?’

Montparnasse watched her for a second, then shut his eyes. ‘Okay,’ he said.

The three quickly huddled together, speaking in hushed tones. ‘Right, what do we think?’ asked Ursa.

‘Obviously we can’t trust either one,’ said Merlin. ‘One can literally tamper with memories, and the other’s a demon. Or a devil. And I’ve never met one of those that could be relied upon.’

‘We’ve only been given orders to clear the haunting out,’ said Nora. ‘So it doesn’t strictly matter what happens to it afterwards. I vote we go down the ‘keep to ourselves’ route and only deal with them if we absolutely have to. Though I would like to know the Fiend’s motives for being here.’

‘Hrmm,’ said Merlin.

‘What?’

‘Oh, nothing. I’m just not used to you agreeing with a sensible option.’

‘I don’t like them either,’ said Ursa, ‘and I’m not too happy about the prospect of coming here after dark with a couple of psychos! But if it’s all going down tonight, there’s not much…’

She trailed off. Montparnasse was grinning at them.

‘You said you wouldn’t listen,’ she said, loudly. ‘Are you breaking your word?’

His smile continued unabated. ‘Of course not. But your two minutes are up. I tuned back in at the part where you called us psychos.’

‘There are some who might take offense at that,’ said Alkahest. ‘Luckily, I am magnanimous. What do you say to our proposition for this evening? I believe the phrase is, ‘the more the merrier’?’

After a shared look between the three, Nora spoke. ‘We’ll be here tonight. In fact, why don’t we come in at closing time? That way we can be on hand before anything might kick off.’

This time Montparnasse and Alkahest shared a look. ‘Deal,’ said the Fae.

*

When Brian awoke, he ran through the plan that had been fed to his unconscious mind. ‘Right, you lot come back a bit before closing, and that way we can get a patrol set up through the night and find whoever it is that’s been breaking in and vandalising the Grönkullas. Hopefully I’ll have found my phone by then.’

That last part about his lost phone had been at Ursa’s request.

Once everyone had filtered out of the staff area, the three of them set about their preparation for the evening’s work. There were still about eight or nine hours before they’d need to be back.

Merlin immediately set to work on his laptop again. When Ursa prodded, he’d simply muttered something about the ‘source of the messages’, and added another skewer of binary digits to the smorgasbord on his screen.

Ursa left him to it, taking out her mobile phone and calling Emva at the Institute. She was worrying about the mind reader, who upon leaving their meeting had just wandered away through the car park. She hadn’t seen which way the Fiend had left.

Which was because he hadn’t. Alkahest was sat in the café, with a heaping plate of meatballs.

A screeching sound heralded Nora’s arrival at his table, as she pulled up a chair as noisily as possible. ‘Hi there,’ she said.

‘Hello,’ said Alkahest, without much enthusiasm.

‘You’re going to explain a few more things.’

‘Am I, now?’

Nora gave a pleasant smile of the kind a dentist offers before showing you their biggest set of pliers. ‘You are.’ There was the distinctive click of a pistol being cocked beneath the table. ‘You can start with why you’re here.’

She reached across the table with her other hand and helped herself to a meatball.

Alkahest sighed. ‘I’m here to deal with this haunting. Same as you.’

‘That’s not what I’m asking and you know it.’

‘Fine. The other guy, the Fae, apparently has orders to destroy the cause of it. I, on the other hand, am here for the purpose of retrieval.’

‘Why? What’s special about this?’

‘I’d gotten a tip that whatever’s causing all this could be useful for future plans. A friend of mine can sense when something powerful comes into play. Though, they can never give me any details; that’s not how it works.’

Nora paused to think about this, covering her hesitation by making a show of enjoying another meatball. ‘So it’s a bigger deal than just a run-of-the-mill haunting. Great. Whose future plans do you want it for?’

‘Ahhh,’ said Alkahest, drawing out the sound with a grin. ‘That’s a good question. Currently, on the Infernal side of things, there’s something of a… power vacuum at the top. Lots of people trying to claw their way upwards.’

‘That’s not an answer,’ said Nora.

Alkahest just kept on smiling like a wolf, so Nora decided that was all she’d get from him. Well, she also got one more meatball, but that was just to make a point.

Ursa was still on the phone when Nora got back. ‘No, no, like some kind of item that could stop our minds from being read. Yes, I know it’s short notice but it’s an emergency. Yes. Yes? Alright, I can, uh… get you some great baking kit in return? Yeah? Ah you’re a lifesaver! Ok. I’ll see you in a couple hours. Thanks again!’

When she saw Nora’s raised eyebrow, she explained: ‘That was Emva, at the Institute. I was asking her for something that might shield us from a psychic Fae. She said she’d see what she could put together if I got her something in return, so we’ll need to nip back to the office before tonight.’

‘Good,’ said Merlin, suddenly at their side with his computer under his arm. ‘I should like to visit the coffee place across the street. I can’t concentrate on coding here. The atmosphere’s just terrible.’

*

Nora and Merlin glared at the chatlog on the laptop’s screen. Neither of them had touched their coffee. Merlin had been trying to track the source of the messages bouncing through the Ikea’s hundreds and hundreds of routers, picking his way through the string like he was untangling Christmas lights.

Ursa had gone to get a peace offering for Emva. The three of them had gone to pick up their mental shielding, and been given a single pair of headphones that Emva had promised would protect them from mind reading, mental control, and charm effects. That they were pink with cat ears was irrelevant.

‘There’s only one pair?’ Ursa had asked, quite sweetly.

‘Yeah, sorry, it was short notice and I didn’t have the bits. I’d have had to disassemble some other stuff!’ said Emva.

‘Emva, I’m grateful for this, but you can see that there’s a problem here, right?’

Emva seemed oblivious to her tone. ‘What’s the problem?’

‘There’s only one. And three of us.’ She gestured to Merlin and Nora, who’d begun to back away as the temperature of the room began to rise.

‘Yeah, I did what I could on short notice. As a favour.’

‘Well, you could have tried a bit harder couldn’t you?’ snapped Ursa, before she could stop herself.

Emva went still as a marble bust. Merlin felt a hand on his shoulder and looked up to see Nora nodding towards the exit. The two had surreptitiously absconded when Ursa next looked to them for backup.

There was shouting as the door closed.

Back in the present, Ursa walked into the coffee shop with nary a scratch upon her. She meekly held a carrier bag filled with baking paraphernalia. ‘I’m gonna head back up in a min,’ she said. ‘I might have been a bit of a jerk before so I wanted to apologise.’

‘Probably smart,’ said Nora. ‘She’s known to hold a grudge.’

Ursa shuddered. ‘What are you two up to?’

Merlin didn’t look up from the screen. ‘We got more messages,’ he explained.

The screen read:

IS SOMEONE THERE?

I CANNOT SEE YOU.

WHY CAN’T I FIND YOU?

WHERE ARE YOU?

COME OUT. COME OUT.

AM I GETTING WARMER

WARMER

WARMER

‘It’s trying to track our IP,’ said Merlin. ‘It shouldn’t be able to because of my VPN, but it seemed to be managing it… then Nora did something.’

Nora had cast a spell she’d learned from her computerised Patron. Digital Phantom, it was called, and she’d used it in the past to conceal her presence in computer systems. It seemed to have worked on this thing, too.

Not that she mentioned any of that to the others.

Ursa went back to see Emva and present her offering. ‘Listen, I’m really sorry for getting huffy about the headphones. I was just stressed about the prospect of having this creep read our minds again, and it got to me more than I’d have liked. That’s not an excuse though. I’m sorry.’ She held out the bag.

Emva took it gingerly, as if it might explode. Though she herself was much more in the business of exploding bags than Ursa. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I might have… overreacted a bit myself.’ She reached into a drawer and produced a second pair of headphones. Black ones this time. ‘I, uh, wanted to apologise too. I don’t think there’s time to make a third pair, but–‘

Ursa scooped her up into a hug, which Emva didn’t seem to like, but definitely appreciated.

Rather than reuniting, the three went back to their respective homes for the afternoon, to try and rest up before the night ahead. There were ghosts to bust.